La Noire de… (1966), Ousmane Sembène
Ousmane Sembène’s La Noire de… (English title: Black Girl) (1966) turns fifty this year. Perhaps Sembène’s best known-film - and one of the first and to this day few African films to attract international attention, La Noire de… is a simple and straightforward narrative, stylistically understated, dreamlike, quietly melancholy. Beneath this subdued face churns fierce political anxieties and an emotional trauma cuttingly personal and individual, yet also broad and historical.
The travails and ultimate tragedy of one woman as she navigates post-independence Dakar and the French Riviera become intertwined with those of a nascent Senegalese state and those of entire peoples, the newly-independent populations of French West Africa, suspended in the uncertain condition of the “postcolonial.” (Mbissine Thérèse Diop, the film’s titular Girl, disputes allegorical interpretations.)
Sembène was, as an artist, first a novelist. He eventually embraced film for its accessibility and universal reach, a “medium that could reconcile the African artist with the millions of peasants, workers, and women, whom Aimé Césaire called “les bouches qui n'ont pas bouches” (those mouths without a mouth).” The heroine of La Noire de… is herself such a mouth, female, disenfranchised, illiterate - Sembène’s political and artistic concerns were often one and the same. La Noire de… shares with much of Sembène’s body of work, literary and cinematic, these political-artistic themes: explorations of African dignity in the face of the European; the struggle of women (many of Sembène’s films featured women; he once stated that“when women progress, society progresses”); the stagnation and rapid transformation and immeasurable contradiction of postcolonial society and identity.
Sembène, as committed to Marxism as he was to shaping an “indigenous” African cinematic form, described the style toward which he strove over his four-decade-long film career as “militant cinema.”